Models of manufacturing have become increasingly complex along supply chains spanning the globe. With the advent of robotics and advanced manufacturing, individual aspects of this supply-chain have become increasingly automated. Awaiting full automation is the supply-chain itself. Automated reasoning about product design and connecting this to robotic capabilities is a step in that direction and the subject of this disclosure.
The Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) is a computer language designed to enable systems to share and re-use information from knowledge systems.
An ontology is a system for the formal definition of types, and/or properties, and/or interrelationships of entities that exist for a particular domain of discourse. The study of Artificial Intelligence (AI) creates ontologies to limit complexity and to organize information. The ontology can then be applied to automated problem solving.
A knowledge representation and reasoning system is a language and environment for constructing intelligent, knowledge-based applications. A typical knowledge representation and reasoning system incorporates features from predicate calculus, a branch of discrete mathematics. Advanced systems complement this discrete mathematics with functional programming concepts, relational database concepts, and quantitative models from the domain of statistics. The PowerLoom® Knowledge Representation & Reasoning System is a knowledge representation and reasoning system by the University of Southern California, that employs the Knowledge Interchange Format.
Build-Your-Own-Blocks is a framework to create Domain Specific Languages as an extension to Scratch. Scratch is a visual programming language where one can create interactive stories, games, and animations. Build-Your-Own-Blocks and Scratch allow basic syntax constructs of a programming language to be represented graphically in a paint-on-a-canvas style application. The approach is primarily targeted at children in educational settings, but it has yet to find wide application in an industrial setting, largely owing to limited expressiveness of the tools and language.